Optimal cognitive radar transmit-receiver design for extended target with unknown target impulse response

In this paper, the problem of joint transmit waveform and receive filter design for cognitive radar (CR) is investigated. The problem is analyzed in signal-dependent interference, as well as additive channel noise for extended target with unknown target impulse response (TIR). An improved online waveform optimization design method is employed for target detection by maximizing the average signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of the received echo on the premise of ensuring the TIR estimation precision. In the proposed method, the transmit waveform and receive filter are optimally determined at each step based on the observations in the previous steps. Simulation results demonstrate that CR with the proposed waveform achieve significantly higher rate of estimation accuracy and detection performance improvement compared to traditional radar system with fixed waveform, and offers more flexibility.